[CharlesColeman]

> I would be extremely impressed if China is able to build a home-grown, state-of-the-art EDA toolchain.

Software is something that's relatively easily stolen, and I'm kinda skeptical it's a national-interest trade secret that can be effectively protected. It probably wouldn't be that hard for a nation-state to hack the EDA vendor and grab their source tree and a build server image. Even if an obviously-pirated version is never released, that level of access would greatly accelerate the development of a workalike clone. That clone may not end up being state of the art, but it could be good enough to neutralize any advantage.